Grombles

Billions of $, £ and € are wasted every year by governments, investment funds, charities and individuals on business start-ups that fail or under-perform at best. I believe that if a professional accredited market research phase is completed before funding is agreed, it would: Ensure start-ups have a better chance of survival. Around half of all start-ups fail within their first 5 years. Around 20% fail in the first year. But virtually all will under-perform against plan in the early years. Success is always harder than anyone ever imagines. Prevent businesses from starting, and funders wasting their money, if propositions don't realistically hold water. Professionalise the owners of those businesses faster than if they learned all their lessons 'the hard way'. So if they do fail, they'll stand a better chance of success next time. The people who perform the market research might become a recruitment resource for the start-ups. The project can be funded by taking ...

I'm a rugby fanatic. I follow club rugby (Harlequins) and international games with a passion. Ideally watching live games is the best way to enjoy the sport. Of course when I can't see an important game live, I watch it on TV, which can sometimes drive me nuts.....  Rugby is a complicated game. It's simple enough to understand the two ways of scoring (tries and kicks over the post) but in order to score there are many rules to observe, and therefore many rules to break - all of which require careful watching of subtleties on the pitch. WHICH YOU CAN'T SEE IF THE BLOODY CAMERAMAN IS ZOOMING IN ON THE BALL.  You also can't see what the players are looking for when they're running - namely opponents, their own team in support, and gaps IF THE BLOODY CAMERA IS ZOOMED INTO THE PLAYER AND NOT THE GAME. Are offending broadcasters sponsored by Gilbert or Nike? The BBC in England and Wales generally cover rugby matches well. But when we play in Scotland or Italy es...

We can easily and very quickly solve our capacity problems at Gatwick and Heathrow in order to boost our economy. But it needs government intervention and imagination. We don't have enough runways for jumbos or immigration processing hubs to make it easy for the people we need to attract to do business here. For example, the UK has no direct flights to and from China's largest city, Guangzhou and its 40m people, let alone all the other places hoping to do business with us. Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris all have many direct flights there for the Chinese to choose from. I expect the same situation exists for most other fast growing cities in India, Vietnam, South Korea etc. The UK is stuck in the past with respect to where we make it easy to travel to and from - and look where this got Greece, Spain and Portugal (once great trading nations). If we are serious about encouraging trading relationships with the world's richest nation (China now has over $3 trillion in reserv...

Greece and Portugal need to market themselves differently. Appeal to our sympathy, not to our hedonism (like everyone else). Our news channels are increasingly showing examples of the very real suffering happening in bankrupt countries - whatever the reasons for their demise. Of course they have to tighten their belts, fix their leaky tax-collection and get real about the future, but these two nations in particular are too small and technologically disadvantaged to find clever ways of growing their economies. It's impossible these days for a small nation to find a niche that can't instantly be copied and offered more cheaply by the likes of China and India - let alone by the UK, Japan and Germany. Every industry they might claim as a niche is either too small to make a difference to their nation's debt or being replaced by something cheaper and probably better (like corks have been replaced by screw tops). All Portugal and Greece realistically have to export is sun and th...

The world falls into three camps. Those who love Twitter; those who've tried it and can't see the point; and those who haven't got a clue what I'm talking about. But to immediately bugger up my carefully crafted analysis, I fall somewhere between the fan and the disappointed. Twitter is an alerting service. It forces brevity and enables people to define their interests. Tweets themselves fall into two basic categories: People and Interests. Once again I will bugger up my own neat distinctions because People can represent a specific Interest you want to 'follow', as well as everything else they're interested in. Equally I might be interested in something which total idiots are also interested in, and I'm not the least bit interested in their utterances - although indeed I might be, but I've got to wade through piles of their rubbish before I find their gems. And therein lies my problem. I'm interested in, for example, atheism. I therefore foll...

I installed a maximum sized domestic 4kw PV solar cell array on my South facing roof just before the government cut off date of 12th December 2011. I therefore qualify for the maximum Feed In Tariff of 43p per kw hour which ought to pay for my investment in about 8 years. So far so good. I do have a chimney which does interfere with some direct sunlight, and later in the day some distant trees do obstruct the sun in winter, so I am not expecting my array to produce as much as a set-up without interrupted sunlight. But I was led to expect a daily average throughout the year of 10kw hours (about 3,500 kwh per year). Our array has rarely produced more than 3 kwh in any day since 12/12/11, despite several very sunny ones. So I called Solarking, the installers (who did pull out all the stops to make sure I had  my installation up and running before the deadline. They were also extremely courteous and delivered a very tidy job). They said, "Don't worry, nobody gets much more th...

My teenage kid, a bright, generous, and thoughtful lad, asked me yesterday what I and my school mates called thick kids at school. I offered words like 'twat', 'idiot', 'clot', 'prat' etc. But what he said next froze me to the core. "We call them Downs". I could not stay calm. "Do you know what a Downs person is? How dare you show disrespect to people, especially children with disabilities. Can't you see how hurtful this would be to parents and siblings of Downs sufferers? How would you feel if you heard it being used as an insult if your own brother was a Downs child?"... and so on. But instead of my normally respectful intelligent son apologising and mumbling that he wasn't thinking and would never do it again, he angrily defended his attitude and those of 'his generation'. "You live in the past. Things are different today" - probably much like I would have argued with my own parents. Is he right? Or have w...